Trading Buildings

Video Tutorial

Check out the embedded video to see the trading specialization in action!

Getting Started with Trading

Trading is unlike other specializations in that the first building can be placed immediately. (Technically the “requirement” is that your city must be connected to the highway, but if you're not connected to the highway, you're not getting anything done anyway.) Your first trade depot costs a mere $10,000, which should be chickenfeed even to an early city.

Once you establish your income strategy, regardless of what it is, place your first trade depot. Its location in the city isn't overly important. When industrial zones add freight, they spawn delivery trucks to deliver the goods. Specialization buildings operate the same way, but if you're investing heavily into mining, drilling, or electronics, you may want to consider placing the trade depot near those buildings regardless of how far away the industrial zones are. Try to keep the trade depot in a relatively low-traffic area to minimize wait times on deliveries.

Every 60 minutes of game time, global Maxis-owned trucks will arrive in your town and head to your trade depot to conduct business, then drive off. Any money that exchanges will be deducted or added to your treasury immediately, but will not be reflected on your profit line of the budget bar. The numbers will be reflected in the “Transactions” window of the budget pane, however.

Note

When the generic freight from industrial zones is shipped, you will not see any of that money. This isn't a bug; the industrial zones keep the profits, but they pay you back in the form of density upgrades, wealth upgrades, tax increases, more jobs for your residential zones, and otherwise helping your city overall.

In order to trade in specific goods, you'll need the appropriate storage lots. Only the ones for raw materials (raw ore, coal, and crude oil) are available right away. Simply edit your trade depot, add the appropriate storage lots as modules, and you're set. Because trade depots have a maximum of four storage lots (including the freight storage lot, which you can destroy if you need to), you'll likely want two or more trade depots if you're going all-out for resources.

Once the appropriate storage lot is placed, simply click your trade depot, then click the “Manage Global Deliveries” button. You'll see a tabbed list of all the goods you're trading in, and can set up individual orders for how to treat that good. The three options are import, export, or use locally (neither import nor export).

Regardless of the orders you place on your trade depots and trade ports, there is a hierarchy of orders they'll follow before actually conducting business:

Local Needs: If one of your buildings needs the good (such as the coal power plant needing coal to operate), the depot will give the good to your own trucks before selling them on the global market, even if it's set to export. This of course assumes you've set the building in question to “Accept Local Deliveries.”

Great Works Sites: If you've started a great work, and you've ordered your city to send resources to it that you're also exporting, your city will send them to help with the great works before exporting them. Also, your city will prioritize sending materials to the Great Work over local needs (such as stocking factories and refineries).

Treasury: Trade depots know how much you have in the treasury, and will not import any goods if you can't afford it, based on the global market price. Exporting goods are unaffected, of course.

Advanced Trading

When placing multiple trade depots, each trade depot has its own separate orders for goods, and each trade depot exchanges goods every 60 minutes. To maximize your income, you'll need multiple trade depots. Your specialization buildings know to share their goods among all your depots, so if you have two depots and enough production to keep up, both will exchange money every hour, effectively doubling your income for that good.

There is a purpose to separate orders for multiple depots as well. Let's say you're getting into drilling, and you've plopped an oil refinery to make some fuel. Now say you have two Trade Depots, and both have crude oil storage lots. You could set one depot to export the oil, and one to use locally. That way you're making money off your excess oil, but you still always have some on hand to produce your fuel.

Most storage lots are unavailable for finished products until you can actually make that product. So for example, once you plop an oil refinery, your trade depot will gain the ability to add fuel and plastic storage lots. This way, you'll have a place to store and export your finished goods.

However, the storage lots are not automatically unlocked for trade ports, not even raw materials. In order to get those unlocked, you'll need one of two similar requirements...

Method 1: Plop a trade HQ, then add a module to unlock a set of storage lots. The Electronics Division unlocks the storage lots for the Electronics specialization goods, for example.

Method 2: Plop a metals HQ, petroleum HQ, or an electronics HQ, then add the Commerce Division module to the HQ building. That will unlock that specialty's set of storage lots, but not the others.

It's expensive to perform either method, but there is good news: the unlock functions across the entire region regardless of whether the cities are connected. If a city in one corner of the region has a trade HQ with a metals division, then a city in the opposite corner of the region will be able to immediately build storage lots for finished metal and alloys.

This is especially useful in regions with multiple great works sites, especially Titan Gorge. After one set of cities works and grinds for the money and buildings to create the materials for a great work, all the cities in the region can benefit and piggyback off their success to start on their own great works sites. Even a new city can contribute: as long as the great work has been approved and is in Phase 1 of construction, it can buy a trade depot or trade port, add the needed goods' storage lots, set them to import the goods, and send them to the great works site.

Once you are able to build trade ports, you should do so. A single storage lot in a trade port holds ten times as many goods of the same storage lot of a trade depot, saving you a tremendous amount of space. Also, you'll have more delivery trucks in trade ports than depots, and each truck has a slightly higher carrying capacity.

You'll want to carefully consider where to place your trade port when you can plop it. Trade ports not only send out trucks, but they can conduct business with ships and trains with the appropriate modules. If you have both a rail connection and the sea, you'll want to place your trade oort near the beach. After all, you can extend the rails in the Trade Port's edit mode, but you can't extend the sea. Even if you can't take advantage of adding ship capabilities to your trade port immediately, placing it near the sea will give you room to grow once the money comes.